Rolling Rhetoric

Midway through his speech at the 1952 Republican National Convention, Herbert Hoover began speaking extremely slowly and then muttered, “This damned thing—I could do better without it!” As often in politics, small flubs carry big revelations: the speech was one of the first instances of a politician using—and misusing—a teleprompter, or, as Hoover later called it, “that blasted contrivance.” Created by the electrical engineer Hubert Schlafly, Jr., the actor Fred Barton, Jr., and the television executive Irving Berlin Kahn (Irving Berlin’s nephew), the teleprompter had débuted two years earlier, on the set of the soap opera “The First Hundred Years.” (The scripts were typed on paper scrolls.) Its role in political life has been vexed. Barack Obama’s teleprompter reliance was a recurring theme of Republican potshots during the 2008 campaign. This year, Rick Santorum dubbed him “reader-in-chief.”

“Most Presidents are dependent on the teleprompter,” Steve Carofalo said recently. As the general manager of QTV, which has prompted every R.N.C. since 1960, he should know. Carofalo was seated amid piles of road cases in QTV’s midtown offices, where packing was under way for this week’s Convention, in Tampa. Carofalo will oversee a staff of eleven and a sixty-box inventory of monitors, glass panels, and backup equipment. “If the microphone goes, they can just yell it out,” he said. “But if the prompter goes down you’re in the shit.”

Carofalo has prompted for everyone from Sting (who stopped him from “decking James Taylor” during a teleprompter-related squabble at a rain-forest benefit) to Ronald Reagan, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday (“He was just so down to earth”). He considers himself a “Bloomberg Republican,” but two decades of prompting Conventions has left him disillusioned. In 1992, when he was a registered Democrat, he prompted both parties’ Conventions back to back. “I realized it’s all rhetoric,” he said.

Still, he described the prompter-promptee relationship as an intimate one, like that of a conductor and a musician. The prompter turns a knob that scrolls the text on a monitor. Carofalo said that the best prompters “breathe along with the speaker.” If an orator accelerates, the prompter shouldn’t necessarily keep pace. “A good operator learns how to rein them in without them knowing.”

That wasn’t the case, however, with Sarah Palin, in 2008. Palin had bonded with a prompter hired by the McCain staff and asked that he prompt her Convention speech. (Carofalo makes this exception only for top-of-the-ticket candidates.) As Palin spoke, the operator began speeding ahead during the applause breaks. “He was almost rolling the words off the screen before she even said them!” Carofalo recalled. The McCain campaign put out word that Palin’s teleprompter had malfunctioned. “My people hated that,” he said.

Carofalo explained that his staff, coming from the New York production scene, is “mostly liberal.” One of this year’s operators will be Michael Barringer, an actor who recently appeared in an Off Broadway Chekhov spoof called “The Three Seagulls, or MASHAMASHAMASHA!” Barringer, who called himself “to the left of most Democrats,” began prompting in 2007, because the hours were flexible. In Tampa, he will prompt for Mitt and Ann Romney and Paul Ryan. “Whenever I tell a friend I’m going to the R.N.C., their first reaction is ‘You gotta sabotage it!’ ” But he has no such plans. “Maybe there will be some terrible things that they’re going to say,” he continued, “but I still have to twiddle the knob, because it’s paying for me to do weird downtown theatre.”

Barringer found the QTV gig through Flux Factory, an artists’ collective in Queens. Its co-founder Morgan Meis has worked the last two R.N.C.s, and will prompt for Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, and others in Tampa. Meis has a Ph.D. in philosophy (dissertation topic: Walter Benjamin) and considered himself a “Frankfurt-school Marxist” for many years. “There’s a cognitive dissonance there, no doubt about it,” he said. “It shook me a couple of times, where I thought, Wow, I see why he’s saying that. I see why he believes that. Then I’d snap out of it and say, ‘It’s wrong! It’s wrong!’ ”

At the 2004 R.N.C., in Madison Square Garden, Meis prompted for Rudolph Giuliani’s rehearsal. “I had found myself in political opposition to His Mayorship, and the content of his speech I found more or less politically disgusting throughout,” he recalled. “But there was something charming and likable about him in person.” Meis told Giuliani that he was leaving the Convention early to get married. “He said, ‘You gotta stay to prompt my speech, because you know how it flows!’ ” Meis agreed to stay an extra day, and, as a gesture of thanks, Giuliani offered to officiate at his wedding. Meis declined, only because the ceremony was in the Catskills. “It would have been weird,” he said, “but I think I would have done it.” ♦

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.